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Sunbeams

To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his right and left hands. He uses both.

Saint Catherine of Sienna

On The Suffering Of Little Things

Everyday tasks become difficult when one constantly worries about the suffering of little things. There are times when I can’t mow the lawn because there are too many grasshoppers dancing about.

Making A Difference

Boxing lessons, frozen puddles, individualized sandwiches

Reconciled

I was laughing at myself, at twenty years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication, an attempted negation of Jesus. A ministry of human engineering, of riding on the coattails of Caesar, of playing in his ballpark, by his rules, and with his ball; of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, of worshiping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making an idol of the Supreme Court; a theology of law and order and of denying, not only the faith I professed to hold, but my history and my people — the Thomas Colemans. For, as much as Jonathan Daniel, they were loved. And if loved, forgiven. And if forgiven, reconciled.

Radical Grace

An Interview With Will D. Campbell

 When we said, “Be a Christian,” who we really got that from was Thomas Merton: Be what you are. You are already katallagete; you are already reconciled. So behave as if that’s true. It’s a fine point to make, but it’s a very important and, I think, radical point.

Ghostwriting

Bull City looks like Fidel Castro: green fatigues, engineer’s cap, and mule-tail, anarchist beard. He’s from Missoula, Montana, but he took his fall — a life sentence — right up the road in Wilkes County, North Carolina. He carries a Bible, a dictionary, a prison-issue loose-leaf, and two sharpened pencils. He wants to be a writer.

Crimes And Misdemeanors

A partner in crime, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a double-dog dare

Practicing Love

We are walking in a ticker-tape parade. That’s all that’s going on. Some pieces of confetti read “great calves,” some “chronic sinus,” some “no noticeable hair loss,” some “multiple sclerosis,” and some “third-finger amputation.” Don’t judge your neighbor by what pieces of paper fall on his or her shoulders. Don’t think you are cursed or blessed by what pieces fall on yours.

In A Broken World

Scott Russell Sanders On Resisting Despair

When I feel so much grief over the woundedness and brokenness of the world that I lose the power or the desire to go on, I turn to members of my family for consolation. Another thing that moves me out of a state of grief is beauty, in all its forms: in nature, in the face of someone you love, in music, in language, in scientific formulas, and in images of remote constellations beamed down from the Hubble space telescope. Beauty reminds me that all the grief, all the loss, all the sadness that is terribly meaningful to me, personally, is just a dust mote in the grand scheme of things. It’s tiny, ephemeral.

Talking To Trees

A doctor, so angry at the inconvenience of being called in to suture a suicidal prisoner’s wrists, said, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t do that again,” and sewed him up without anesthetic. That doctor was employed by the state to cut medical costs. He still is.